An Army at Dawn (19 page)

Most of Raff’s surviving men arrived at Tafaraoui by truck on November 9. The surgeon Carlos Alden, who had petitioned God’s protection in Cornwall, was the sole man in the battalion to reach the field by air on the morning of November 8. He had remained on
Shark Bait
after the other paratroopers got out to walk across the
sebkra
.

British skepticism of
VILLAIN
had been well founded. The operation contributed nothing to the invasion while expending half of all Allied parachute forces. Just fourteen of the thirty-nine planes could fly again immediately. At a time when every infantry squad was precious to the Allied cause, only fifteen paratroopers were judged fit for another mission within three days.

On the first day of their invasion, the Allies had nearly surrounded Oran. They had put thousands of soldiers ashore with only light casualties. The Royal Navy controlled the sea if not the port. But
VILLAIN
had demonstrated, like
RESERVIST
before it, that temerity untempered by judgment would exact a heavy price in this war.

To the Last Man

V
IEWED
from the great half-moon bay that cradled the city, Algiers spread up the verdant hills like an alabaster vision. Distance lent an enchantment not wholly dispelled by the stench of the Arab quarter or the vaguer odor of French colonial rule. Cinemas, emporiums, and chic cafés lined shady avenues enlivened each evening by promenading boulevardiers. Algiers had been an inconsequential hamlet until Moors expelled from Spain in 1492 took sanctuary there. Like Oran, the city soon thrived on piracy, and for more than three centuries sheltered corsair fleets that terrorized the Mediterranean basin. Barbarossa’s sixteenth-century palace still crowned the skyline 400 feet above the harbor; a Western traveler in the 1920s fancied that the old heap “resounded to the groans of Christian slaves.”

For more than a century, Algiers had been the epicenter of France’s North African empire, a “white-walled city of flies and beggars and the best Parisian scent.” To one Frenchman, the old pirate haven now resembled “a reclining woman, white and naked, leaning on her elbow.” To Eisenhower and his planners, Algiers was the key to Algeria if not the entire African littoral. As the easternmost landing site in
TORCH
, the city was to provide a springboard for the subsequent drive into Tunisia. The Anglo-American invaders—thinly disguised as an all-American force—would be followed immediately by British troops who were to pivot ninety degrees to the east and make for Tunis.

So it was that Robert Murphy in the earliest minutes of November 8 pelted through the city’s affluent suburbs in his big Buick on the most important diplomatic mission of his life. The American envoy had remained in his office until early Saturday evening, affecting a placidity he did not feel. “Two years of hopeful soundings and schemings,” as he put it, were about to be tested. Murphy had been stung by the sharp rebuff from Eisenhower and the White House to his proposed delay of the
TORCH
landings. “I am convinced,” he had cabled Roosevelt, “that the invasion of North Africa without favorable French high command will be a catastrophe.” The reply from Washington had been unequivocal: “The decision of the president is that the operation will be carried out as now planned.” Murphy was instructed “to secure the understanding and cooperation of the French officials with whom you are now in contact.”

He had done his best. Trusted French rebels, including General Mast, had been given several days’ advance warning of the invasion. Upon hearing a prearranged radio message from London on Saturday night—
“Allo, Robert. Franklin arrivé”
—Murphy alerted the rebels that the landings were about to begin. The coup in Oran had evidently miscarried, but in Algiers several hundred French partisans began to seize key installations despite the failure of Clark to deliver the modern weapons he had promised at Cherchel; the intent, a French historian later wrote, was “to chloroform the city.” By ruse and by force, the insurgents soon controlled police and power stations, Radio Algiers, telephone switchboards, and army headquarters, where the French corps commander was held incommunicado. Some Vichy officers happily acquiesced in their arrests—“it saved them,” one observer noted, “any painful search of their conscience.” As for Murphy’s repeated radio query to Gibraltar—“Where is Giraud?”—there had been no satisfactory answer.

At 12:45
A.M.
on Sunday he arrived at the Villa des Oliviers, a blocky, mustard-hued Arab palace in the well-heeled enclave of el-Biar; brushing past the tall Senegalese sentries, Murphy rapped on the door. A swarthy, mustachioed man in a foul mood came to the foyer. General Alphonse Pierre Juin, commander of all Vichy ground troops in North Africa, usually favored a Basque beret and a mud-spattered cape; at this moment he wore pink-striped pajamas. Maimed in 1915, Juin had been authorized to salute with his left hand, but he offered Murphy neither salute nor handshake.

“I am happy to say that I have been instructed by my government to inform you that American and British armies of liberation are about to land,” Murphy said.

“What! You mean the convoy we have seen in the Mediterranean is going to land here?”

Murphy nodded, unable to suppress a nervous grin.

“But you told me only a week ago that the United States would not attack us.”

“We are coming by invitation,” Murphy said.

“By whose invitation?”

“By the invitation of General Giraud.”

“Is he here?”

Preferring not to disclose that Giraud was sulking in a Gibraltar cave, Murphy waved aside the question. “He will be here soon.”

Murphy described the invasion forces lurking off the African coast, multiplying their size severalfold. “Our talks over the years have convinced me,” he told Juin, “that you desire above all else to see the liberation of France, which can come about only through cooperation with the United States.”

Now the opéra bouffe began in earnest. General Juin voiced sympathy with the Allied cause but was hindered by the unexpected presence in Algiers of his superior officer. “He can immediately countermand any orders I issue,” Juin said. “If he does, the commands will respect his orders, not mine.” Twenty minutes later, after a quick phone call and the hurried dispatch of a driver with the Buick, one of the war’s most reviled figures strolled into the Villa des Oliviers.

In a truncated nation of small men, Admiral Jean Louis Xavier François Darlan stood among the smallest. Stumpy and pigeon-breasted, given to jocose vulgarity and monologues on the efficiency of the German army, he was the sixty-one-year-old scion of French sailors. The death of his great-grandfather at Trafalgar supposedly fed Darlan’s pathological hatred of the British, although it was the Americans who called him Popeye. The French fleet was his fiefdom, but he also served as Marshal Pétain’s dauphin and commander of all Vichy armed forces. His favors to the Nazis had included the use of Vichy airports in Syria and resupply aid to Rommel through Tunisia. Churchill called him “a bad man with a narrow outlook and a shifty eye.”

By a coincidence that would forever seem either contrived or divine, Darlan was in Algiers to attend his son, Alain, who lay in the Hôpital Maillot so reduced by polio that his coffin had been ordered. Several times in the past two years, the admiral had privately hinted at supporting the Allies if circumstances warranted. Just before Eisenhower left London for Gibraltar, Churchill had told him, “If I could meet Darlan, much as I hate him, I would cheerfully crawl on my hands and knees for a mile if by doing so I could get him to bring that fleet of his into the circle of Allied forces.” Roosevelt on October 17 had sent Murphy similar if less histrionic instructions, authorizing any arrangement with the Vichy admiral that might help
TORCH
.

But Darlan seemed disinclined to parley. Upon learning of the imminent invasion, he flushed and replied, “I have known for a long time that the British are stupid, but I have always believed Americans were more intelligent. Apparently you have the same genius as the British for making massive blunders.”

For fifteen minutes, Darlan paced the room and sucked on his pipe. Murphy shortened his stride and paced beside him, insisting, “The moment has now arrived!” The admiral waved off the entreaties. “I have given my oath to Pétain,” he insisted. “I cannot revoke that now.” But he agreed to radio Vichy for guidance. Upon stepping outside, however, the men found that the Senegalese guards had been replaced by forty rebels wearing white armbands and armed with long-barreled rifles dating to the Franco-Prussian War. Juin was incredulous. “Does this mean we are prisoners?” he asked.

It did. Murphy’s colleague, the Apostle Kenneth Pendar, was dispatched to the Admiralty office downtown with Darlan’s sealed message for Vichy, which Pendar promptly opened, read, and discarded as insufficiently zealous for the Allied cause. Returning to the villa, Pendar told Darlan cryptically, “The necessary has been done.”

As the impasse dragged on with no word from Vichy and no sign of the Allied invaders, Murphy dimly wondered whether he had confused the date and launched his putsch a day early. The hours ticked past. Dawn approached. Darlan stopped pacing and puffing long enough to offer some thoughtful political advice. “Giraud is not your man,” he said. “Politically he is a child. He is just a good division commander, nothing more.”

The insurrection, in fact, was collapsing. Loyalist forces gathered their composure—“This isn’t just a civil defense drill?” one perplexed Vichy officer asked—and recaptured the strong points one by one. At army headquarters, insurgents and loyalists sang the “Marseillaise” together before the rebels stacked their arms and filed from the building. Upon learning of the events in Algiers and Oran, Pétain in Vichy sent President Roosevelt a curt message: “France and her honor are at stake. We have been attacked. We will defend ourselves.”

A loyalist patrol with three tanks arrived at the gates of the Villa des Oliviers, dispersing the rebels and locking Murphy and Pendar in the porter’s lodge. Juin’s aide rushed about waving an enormous revolver at the Americans, crying, “What have you done? What have you done?” Pendar wondered if he had blundered into a production of
Pirates of Penzance.
A Senegalese sentry offered each American a Gitane cigarette, the customary courtesy to those about to face a firing squad.

Regrettably, the Allies had planned a frontal assault on Algiers harbor that was identical to
RESERVIST
in folly. Again the mission was concocted and commanded by the British, with a predominately American supporting cast. Code-named
TERMINAL
and designed to capture the port intact, the attack featured two antiquated destroyers, H.M.S.
Broke
and H.M.S.
Malcolm,
under Captain H. L. St. J. Fancourt of the Royal Navy. Engineers welded quarter-inch iron sheeting, three feet high, around the upper deck of each ship as a thin shield against sniper fire. Forward compartments in the bow were filled with concrete, and heavy armor plates covered the prow. About the time Murphy began wondering whether he had confused the invasion date, these floating rams reached the eleven-fathom line in the Bay of Algiers and swung west toward the boom blocking the harbor entrance.

The 686 soldiers aboard
Broke
and
Malcolm
came from the 3rd Battalion of the 135th Infantry, which had left Minnesota almost two years earlier to join her sister regiments from Iowa in the 34th Division. The regiment’s motto—“To the last man”—had been hard won at Gettysburg. The 3rd Battalion called itself “the Singing 3rd,” and had mastered an impressive repertoire of barracks ballads, including one bawdy British ditty called “There’s a Troopship Now Leaving Bombay.” The unit retained its Minnesota accent, and the ranks were full of Ericksens, Carlsons, and Andersens. The battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Edwin T. Swenson, was a former assistant warden of the Minnesota State Penitentiary at Stillwater.

Witty and bighearted, with the craggy face of a prizefighter, Colonel Swenson was reputedly capable of swearing fluently for hours without ever repeating an expletive; he had told the British that his battalion’s top sergeant was whoever could whip him in a fistfight. Captain Fancourt in turn told Swenson that Allied commandos would capture French batteries overlooking the port; that several of the French guns could not be tilted low enough to hit targets below anyway; and that initial landings east and west of Algiers, which would start before the
TERMINAL
attack, would likely draw defenders away from the harbor. None of this proved true.

The lights of Algiers twinkled as the destroyers made for the boom extending from the crescent seawall. American flags flapped from the masts. Then the city lights went out and searchlight beams scissored across the water. Swenson briefly believed they were meant to direct the intruders toward the harbor entrance. But the beams found and fixed both ships, blinding those on the bridge. Sporadic gunfire opened as
Broke
, with
Malcolm
a mile astern, sheered to starboard to avoid a breakwater and then came about under a thick screen of smoke. A second try to find and sever the boom also failed, as did efforts to shoot out the searchlights and to illuminate the harbor mouth with flares, which were swallowed by the destroyers’ own smoke.